I called my good old buddy Bob in Victoria British Columbia... He agrees with my friend in Alberta about cutting the holes and agrees with magnetizing the tool to keep the nut from rattling around in your subframe if you decide to go the distributor wrench route.

But before you do, are you planning on replacing the control arm bushings, because if you are, Bob says it gets easy if the control arms aren't in the way. I don't have the schematics of a 79 Camaro front suspension in front of me but this is a question I was asked by my good friend.

I hope some of the information I got from good friends helps. This apparently is a problem that everybody has doing mounts on your 2nd gen F body front subframe.

I'm going to replace EVERY bushing on that front end because they don't look like they're from a 1979 car.... they all look like they're from the original 1949 !!

This car drove real tight not loose all over the place so unless I actually saw all of this I would have never believed it if a mechanic told me he had to replace all of this. Goes to show that I have to trust the experts. Of course trust and verify is my motto since there are lots of shysters out there too. I trust my neighbor though, he's slow but the job gets done correctly.

I'm going to replace it all because they all look dried up. They're not that expensive now that I know that I don't NEED to use poly ( thanks again ).

Yeah, I'll also be able to help someone else out in the future when they ask about something like this.

if your going to replace all the bushings and you have the car in front of you, would it be easier to replace the mounts (as my friend in Alberta said) with the control arms off the car? If it is easier, maybe wait until then, unless it conflicts with something else.

Talking about trust, as you may have noticed, below the heading "69 Widetrack" I have my mantra. Faith, Respect, Trust. I try to live by these 3 words and I'll explain them to you.

If I ask you to do something, it's because I have "faith" in you that you will and can do it.
If you do it, I will "respect" you.
If you do it often enough, I will "Trust" you.

if your going to replace all the bushings and you have the car in front of you, would it be easier to replace the mounts (as my friend in Alberta said) with the control arms off the car? If it is easier, maybe wait until then, unless it conflicts with something else.

Talking about trust, as you may have noticed, below the heading "69 Widetrack" I have my mantra. Faith, Respect, Trust. I try to live by these 3 words and I'll explain them to you.

If I ask you to do something, it's because I have "faith" in you that you will and can do it.
If you do it, I will "respect" you.
If you do it often enough, I will "Trust" you.

Just something that has helped me through life.

Ray

Sounds very wise. When you say :

" If you do it often enough, I will "Trust" you. "

It would work both negative and positive:
If they do it often enough and keep screwing it up = bad
If they do it often enough and learned from their mistakes and now do it right = trustworthy

I'll remove the control arms, sway bars, everything tomorrow so I can then get to the mounts.

No hurry since I have scheduled this entire week to do that plus clean and paint the engine block, clean all acc's attached to the engine (water pump, power steering pump, etc.), remove the rest of the brake lines from the frame, get the frame down to nothing on it so I can take it to the sandblaster NEXT Monday. I was hoping to do that this week but my schedule has to be flexible because I keep running into these little issues that make me have to research and then come here to confirm my results and then get them shot down with the correct way to do them

Well even if I get my conclusion shot down on how to do something, the time I spent researching definitely helped me learn more about my truck so it's time well spent. I also hated when an employee brought to my attention a problem but didn't bring me a possible solution with it. That told me the employee didn't even try to fix it = lack of initiative = soon to be ex-employee.

Isn't that the truth about problems and solutions. If people would only realize that finding solutions, and it doesn't matter where you get the solutions if it's by research, ingenuity or just plain common sense, is so personally gratifying. The easy part is to find a problem, everybody has the ability to do that, the challenging part is to provide a solution and when you do you also get faith, respect and the trust of other individuals.

Glad to hear about your motor mount situation, probably a good idea to replace those parts while it's all apart and again, you will know what you have.

Exactly. At one time I was going to just fix a few things and make it a rat rod but then as I started taking it apart and noticing all the bad installations I figured let's fix it up a little more. Then the Air Force in me stepped in and I decided a complete restore is the best and only route to take to make it safe since I now plan on keeping it for a long time.

It sounds so familiar, I know what you mean. I get into something and I can't do it half way. If I did it would bother me for ever and haunt me. Like I used to tell painters that I was training, nobody ever talks about the average paint job, they only talk about the really good ones and the really bad ones. The nice part is they get to decide what kind of paint job people talk about when it comes to their work.

That's so true about talking about the worst and the best. I'm going to get some rest watching some TV now so I can get up early and hit that frame. Talk to you later, thanks again Ray and have a great night.

So today the guy I've been waiting for to help me change the TransAm rear to my Ford tells me he's not coming this weekend again, 3 weekends in a row. So I went to the swap meet to see what I could find now that I know a little more than last month and I found a '85 Firebird rear with disc brakes and emergency brake and got it for $75!

That just saved me the hassle of removing it from my TransAm so I put my TransAm on Craigslist for sale and already have 2 guys coming tomorrow to buy it.

Now the good stuff. I opened it and every tooth is there and it is very smooth where I can turn it by hand and nothing is binding or catching, very smooth.

As you can see in the pictures it has the GM number in the casting but unless it's still factory inside I understand that number is useless. I also have these numbers I found on the "center thing where the drive shaft connects" that I think is called the pinion. I counted 10 teeth on the pinion but I could be wrong because my neighbor was turning it at 1000 rpm while I tried to count even though I asked him to slow down many times. It was easier to just try again tomorrow if the numbers don't reveal the story. That number is :

22521254 then a small trademark type square with the letters HP inside then 11 41 GM 9 then a very lightly stamped M at the end.

I didn't see anything on the ring but I'll look closer tomorrow because it was already dark outside where the heavy rear is. I did however count the teeth on the ring and came up with 41 teeth.

So how do I figure out what the ratio and if I have a gas guzzler or a cruising differential? Can the numbers tell if it's limited slip too?

So today the guy I've been waiting for to help me change the TransAm rear to my Ford tells me he's not coming this weekend again, 3 weekends in a row. So I went to the swap meet to see what I could find now that I know a little more than last month and I found a '85 Firebird rear with disc brakes and emergency brake and got it for $75!

That just saved me the hassle of removing it from my TransAm so I put my TransAm on Craigslist for sale and already have 2 guys coming tomorrow to buy it.

Now the good stuff. I opened it and every tooth is there and it is very smooth where I can turn it by hand and nothing is binding or catching, very smooth.

As you can see in the pictures it has the GM number in the casting but unless it's still factory inside I understand that number is useless. I also have these numbers I found on the "center thing where the drive shaft connects" that I think is called the pinion. I counted 10 teeth on the pinion but I could be wrong because my neighbor was turning it at 1000 rpm while I tried to count even though I asked him to slow down many times. It was easier to just try again tomorrow if the numbers don't reveal the story. That number is :

22521254 then a small trademark type square with the letters HP inside then 11 41 GM 9 then a very lightly stamped M at the end.

I didn't see anything on the ring but I'll look closer tomorrow because it was already dark outside where the heavy rear is. I did however count the teeth on the ring and came up with 41 teeth.

So how do I figure out what the ratio and if I have a gas guzzler or a cruising differential? Can the numbers tell if it's limited slip too?

The numbers you are concerned with is the *11 41* stamping. That tells you the ratio is 3.73:1. It's an open diff.

Thanks Cobalt. Since you added the comment open differential I Googled it to learn more about it and found these animations. I'm sure this is super basic to you but it's really good when trying to understand how these things actually work.

Now I remember that we used to weld the insides on my Toyota so I'd have both wheels grabbing the road on our 1/4 mile drag races and can see why the tires screeched as I turned. I knew what was going on with the tires because I could see it but now see what was going on inside too.

Hi Carlos, welding up the inside of a rear end to give you "constant posi-traction" is not a good idea, especially if you plan to drive it a lot of street miles, but I'm sure you know that from experience. A 373 gear is an excellent mid to low gear ratio, good for get up and go off the line and fairly manageable at higher speeds...now you need to shoe horn that rear end into your truck...what are your ideas?...Hows the width of the rear end compared to the ford that you have in it now?

Hi Ray. No way I'm welding this I was just remembering what I used to do when I was young and dumb.

This rear is axle to axle about 4" less than what I have on now so it works out great. Now I can add wider tires and they wont stick out the sides. Since I'm going to build a flat bed with stakes I won't have inner fenders to contend with either.

I'm planning on cutting off everything that sticks out of it leaving it bare so I can mount it on the leaf springs like the other one. I'd like to have coils instead of springs only because I'm a minimalist and it looks better to me but my neighbor doesn't know how to deal with that and I'd rather be safe than sorry and keep it simple.

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